Trophy 2

Belladonna Belucci slept poorly, though she slept in the nude, her tossing body soothed through the night by silk sheets that had been laundered by servants that very morning.

Still, she slept dreaming of her family, the Scagliones. They were of Cosa Nostra, but small-time, a collection of working-class number boys and pushers from New Jersey—barely able to afford the summers in the Mother Country where Bella had lost her virginity.

Bridling under the weight of the New York Beluccis, rulers of that city’s lucrative drug trade and smuggling operations. They’d poached the Scagliones’ best operators—and prettiest girls—for generations. Meanwhile Bella’s forefathers toiled in obscurity, tied by their blood to the turf but forced to see brothers and sisters go into the big leagues, made torpedoes and mistresses in ritzy apartments while they were restricted to a literal dog and pony show. Greyhound races and horse races.

And now she’d been poached by the Beluccis too.

Bella woke before her uneasy recollections reached the honeymoon. She got up from her sweat-stained sheets, knowing that the sooner she’d left them, the sooner the maid would clean them, and went down to the swimming pool without bothering to dress. It would be a bad day, she knew; only her unvarnished sexuality could make it a good one.

She got stares from some of the household staff, averted eyes from others. There were those used to her proclivities and those who feared her husband more than they enjoyed the sight of her. Bella thought that spoke more to Vincenzo’s rage than her beauty. She knew that if she truly wished it, she could have any man or woman who gazed upon her.

Normally, this would be enough to cheer her up—the mere thought did bring a small smile to her face. But the air was too thick with nothingness. None of the suburbs’ running lawnmowers, none of the city’s car horns. Nothing to dispel her memories. They lingered on, more terrible than ever: dead things when she’d dreamed them up that had come alive with her waking mind.

She dived into the outdoor pool, obscuring her nakedness for the first time that day in a flurry of bubbles, then knifed through the water in one lap after another. The cool water caressing her feverish body, comforting it as her bed had been unable to. Even though her husband Vincenzo had never had her in that bed, she wished to get rid of it. It now seemed infected by the memories catching up with her.

She’d been seventeen when Vincenzo married her. He was thirty-five, with a thirteen-year-old son already by his dead Belucci wife. On her honeymoon, Bella had tried to be a good wife to a man she didn’t love, offering herself without compunction to him.

He, in return, had tried his hardest to rape a surrendered woman. Years later, she would realize he saw this as the climax of his war with the Scagliones—that he was taking her not as an act of love or even pleasure, but as a final victory over her family.

And her brothers had wanted this for her, told her that they were all but getting what they wanted. They would all have the prize of a hand in New York’s drug trade. She was only the price to be paid, whoring herself out for their profit.

It was a small mercy that her surrender only had to happen once. Afterward, Vincenzo’s old-world Mafiaso philosophy sabotaged his libido. He saw women as good or bad, Madonna or whore, and only whores merited the aggression that was the only emotion he could share with the world.

Bella, his wife, was now occupied territory. His soldier’s mind did not spend any more time on her.

Instead, he busied himself with the spoils of conquest. The prettiest of girls from the white slave trade were brought to him, bathed and perfumed, straight from the cargo ships they’d been smuggled in on. He would have his way with them and send them away, bruised and bleeding, to give repeat performances as the brothels they’d been brought into the country to populate.

Bella watched them go sometimes.

She tried not to think about them.

She tried not to think about herself either.

The swim was good for her. It always was. Exertion sweated the night’s unresolved emotion from her body, while the water swept away all evidence, leaving only a feeling of cleanliness and refreshment.

She’d been Vincenzo’s wife for almost seven years now. If she’d aged, it had only been to grow more beautiful. Her svelte hips were now fuller, firmer; her breasts had gone up a cup size. Daily tanning had made her skin a lovely bronze, bringing out her tawny Italian heritage despite years of American blood-mingling, and her raven-black hair was primped and preened on a weekly basis. It was agonizingly exquisite when styled and even when disheveled, it possessed a savage beauty.

Bella loved to look at herself in the mirror when she was freshly fucked, skin flushed and hair wild. It was like she’d allowed out an anger fuming inside her, given it some slack in its leash, but remained in control. Still beautiful. Still desirable. Still satisfied.

Oh yes: just because Bella’s husband was impotent with her did not mean she went without sex. She very nearly flaunted her affairs, flirting outrageously with anyone Vincenzo brought into her orbit and taking lovers wherever they caught her eye. The chauffeur, the gardener—not the pool boy, that would be just too cliché and she didn’t like his hair, but it was a joy to let him watch.

She did not quite advertise herself to Vincenzo to the extent of fucking in front of him, but having so many of his servants and made men complicit in her adultery served much the same function.

Bella did not consider herself a slut. She was too beautiful for that. Bella thought of the slut as a woman who could only keep a man by giving him her cunt because she was deficient in beauty.

And Bella could keep a man with beauty alone, she knew.

She enjoyed having sex.

Or at least was assuaged by it.

Because on mornings like this, much as she jogged or swam or rowed in her little exercise machine… always something that might make her think she was getting away from her demons… Bella knew she was but a bird in a gilded cage.

Not the house. Her family. Her friends. Her brothers, who were so sure that this was the perfect life for her.

And what’s worse—what really made her push herself until she was so toned and fit and muscular that she might not have aged a day since her wedding ceremony—she knew it could be perfect.

She liked the pretty things that came with being the kingpin’s wife. She liked being waited on hand and foot. She liked the make-up and the hair salons and the spas that kept her looking beautiful enough to satisfy any man.

Only the man she’d been destined for did not truly want her.

And she couldn’t want him. Despite his age, Vincenzo was a handsome man. And despite his roughness… despite his roughness… Bella had come, while he used her. Her most shameful secret. That there was a world, not so far off from hers, where she could enjoy Vincenzo’s attentions and he could enjoy having a beautiful, loving wife.

But it wasn’t this one. And Bella wondered if that was because she had no love to give. If she could not seduce her husband because there was nothing within her for him to fall in love with.

She hated him. She hated herself. Hate had become so familiar to her that love was damn near a foreign concept; her understanding of hatred was so much more meticulous.

Bella could not take from him as he had taken from her, so she gave instead. The body that could’ve been his to so many others. All the time assuring herself that there was love within her to go with it, it was only that she was not expressing it.

She was trying to repay Vincenzo for using her, after all. How else to do that than to use others, amorally, thoughtlessly, until she either got what she wanted or decided there was not enough left of her soul to want.

Perhaps she’d shoot herself then. Why should she give Vincenzo the satisfaction of seeing her as wrinkled and gray as he was becoming?